I used to skip lunch in high-school because I convinced myself that I wasn’t hungry. I once threw up acid from my empty stomach, after not eating anything for 12+ hours.

Hi, my name is Liz, and I used to starve myself in public.

You hear skinny people, who think they are still fat, having an eating disorder more often than you’ll hear a fat person having one. If the standard for having an eating disorder is not eating/starving yourself, wouldn’t it apply to all types of bodies?

I am not saying I have an eating disorder whatsoever, but there were times in my life that I said “No, I’m not hungry” with a stomach growling.

I was never self-conscious about me eating in public. To this day, my sister and I talk about the many nostalgic school lunches we had in our public school years. Needless to say, I always ate lunch, and it was actually good. Once I started to get bullied in middle school, slowly but surely that stopped happening. I would eat just a couple of bites before ultimately throwing my tray away, and whenever I went over to a friend’s house, I would say that I wasn’t hungry, despite me really wanting to eat what their parents cooked for dinner.

As my self-hatred for my body began to grow, I started to binge eat in the privacy of my home, after hours of not eating in public.

Even before I knew I had anxiety, I had anxiety. I was afraid of eating in public because I didn’t want to be seen as “the fat girl who’s eating.” I mean, that’s your typical narrative: fat girl refuses to eat in public because she doesn’t want to look fat in public.

If I couldn’t eat actual meals in front of friends, it was even harder to eat in front of my partner for the first couple of years we knew each other. The first time he ever caught me eating was a Big Mac on a coach bus back from a performance we had, and although he didn’t make me feel bad about eating a Big Mac in public, I still was kicking myself for eating a Big Mac in public, in front of the guy I really liked. 

Even after he graduated high-school and we still hung out outside of school, I never ate in front of him. He would offer me a snack, a drink, and meals whenever we would hang out, and by this point in my journey, my response became second nature, like a reflex:

No, I’m not hungry.

After the many teenage years of getting away with eating nothing for hours on end, I was now entering my 20’s, with a freshly removed gallbladder after being in extreme pain for the latter of my 19th year. I still didn’t eat in public for a while, but I realized that now doing so came with more than just a growling stomach. It came with actual illness.

One afternoon during my sophomore year of college, I was on the bus, going home after being out of the house and on campus since 5:30 in the morning. I didn’t eat anything that morning, during the day, even up to this exact moment. One minute I was just listening to my music on my iPod Touch, the next thing you know my stomach is in a literal knot. I couldn’t feel my stomach; it had gone completely numb. I started to sweat profusely, my headache intensified, and I got dizzy. I thought I was going to pass out on a bus just stops away from mine. I did what my mother told me to do: take a Motrin I had in my bag. For the most part, it helped keep my focus, but the stomach pains, boy they are singlehandedly the most painful thing I’ve experienced in my life thus far.

I knew I couldn’t get away from not eating in public anymore. I didn’t get over my fear of eating in public because I wanted to, I had to for the sake of my health. Like, I would choose to eat in public than practically fainting from the pain my body induced when I didn’t.

“Yes, I would love to have something to eat.”

The more I had to accept that my health depended on me eating (even snacking) during the day, I started to care more about my body’s needs instead of my anxieties of eating in public. I accepted that all bodies deserve to be fed and that human beings, big or small, need to fuckin’ eat in order to survive. Slowly but surely, I ate whole meals in front of my partner, I eat in front of my friends, and I will murder a snack package of cookies and a bag of chips in public.

My self-image of not appearing hungry was unrealistic and just plain stupid. Although the removal of my gallbladder has caused a lot of my weight gain, I’m grateful that the removal of it literally made me more accepting to the fact that it’s okay to eat in public! If it’s 9 o’clock in the morning and I’m not going to be able to eat my first meal of the day until lunchtime, then you best to believe I’m eating a bag of chips just to hold me over until then. Of course, there are other healthy alternatives, but it’s whatever I have at that moment, I’m eating.

Just because I’m fat, doesn’t mean I don’t deserve the human right to eat.

We’ve all seen it in the movies: two best friends, one skinny and the other one fat, and they have a pretty good relationship with one another. They’ve probably been friends since their childhood and they’ve been inseparable since.

The skinny one is usually the main character though, who probably falls in love with the popular guy at school (that’s actually dating the blonde-haired mean girl who’s captain of the cheerleading squad) and then there’s her fat friend, being the one depicted as the weird, quirky girl that would body slam anyone who messes with her skinny friend.

Where’s my friggin Academy Award. 

Hi, my name is Liz, and I’m the “fat friend” in this narrative.

For most of my childhood and adolescence years, I had numerous best friends. All were pretty diverse if you ask me: Puerto Rican, Mexican, Chinese, Dominican, Pakistani, Jamaican, Irish – you name it. But, many of these friends had something in common: they were skinny. Sure, I’ve had a couple of chubby chicks as my best friends in the days, and we conquered whatever life handed to us at that moment, but ultimately, they were skinny. I was never envious of them being skinny; to be quite frank, that never even crossed my mind. Still, it doesn’t mean that our differences in our appearance didn’t feel like a burden.

Being the “fat friend”, I never got to experience the whole “can I borrow your sweater?” or the whole “I have a pair of pajamas you can wear for the night!” scenario. One skinny girl pant leg would probably stop at my shin, I kid you not. It was sort of frustrating to see a group of girls wear the same shirt or wear each other’s clothes, and I mean being skinny came in handy when your period came unexpectedly and now you have a big blood stain on the back of your jeans. 

I had to have numerous family members come to hand-deliver clothes to me, in the main office, in front of everyone, whenever I bled through a pair of jeans.

Also, being the “fat friend” also meant that you’d hear at least the words “fat bitch” come from your own friends if you guys were in an argument with one another. I had a friend in grade school tell another friend of ours that I was a “fat bitch” because I was giving her an attitude during lunchtime. I mean, what was I supposed to say? “Oh, get over it, you skinny bitch!”

Being the biggest girl in a group of girls was always discouraging because it constantly feels like you’re the ugliest one in the group and you feel like they only have you around to make themselves feel better. “Oh, I have such bad acne this week, but at least I’m not fat 24/7″…

Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit, but you get where I’m coming from.

I think the hardest pill I had to swallow during those years was boys. Boy, I was a hopeless romantic and I had tons of crushes on boys. Boys were always a tricky thing with friends, and there were lots of times where both my friends and I had the same crush on a boy in our grade. There were also countless times that my friends dated the boy I had a crush on after openly knowing I liked them too, and there were times when I confessed to me liking a boy to that boy and getting the response of: “You’re not really my type, but can you give my AIM screenname to your friend?”

Being the “fat friend” in my younger years contributed to the self-hate I had for my body growing up, and it’s taken… what, a decade to stop hating the body that I have.

I don’t blame those skinny friends for the self-hatred of my body; I blame the society norms, the portrayal in the media, and the friendzone that we fat girls lived in for most of our adolescent years.

As a 25-year-old woman with not so many friends due to past trauma and the development of my social anxiety disorder, I’m learning to be my own damn fat friend. We’re both fat, we’re both gorgeous, and we’re both striving!

Plus, it’s 2019 – the fat friend in the movies is just as valid as everyone else too!

Hello, my name is Liz, and I’m a Pepsiholic.

This is my intervention.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with Pepsi. Maybe it was even before I was born; you know how when mothers are pregnant with their children and they eat or drink something constantly through that pregnancy and the children come out loving that specific food/drink?

No? Maybe I just made that up to justify my unhealthy relationship with Pepsi.

My earliest memory with the beverage dates back to my childhood; my two front teeth were rotten due to the fact that I liked to drink Pepsi out of a baby bottle way later than I should have. I don’t understand how, nor why Pepsi is a literal addiction for me, but it was, it still is, and it’s honestly the #1 cause of me gaining weight all these years.

I’ve tried to kick the old habit for years now, and if quitting smoking feels the way that it feels quitting Pepsi, then I now understand why it’s almost impossible to quit smoking. Addiction is addiction no matter what it is, and mine so happens to be the sugary concoction that is Pepsi.

The first time I quit Pepsi for good, I didn’t drink it for almost a year. Then I turned 20 years old and decided to have a celebratory drink of Pepsi and bam, back at it again with the constant soda drinking.

Like an addiction, I have a love/hate relationship with the beverage. For starters, it tastes so good after a long day of whatever you were doing, yet I know how bad it is for me and is probably the #1 cause of why I’m now considered pre-diabetic at the age of 25.

Maybe I should’ve listened to my father when he told me at the age of 12 that I’ll get diabetes if I don’t lose weight…

Anyway, it’s something I’m not proud of, but I acknowledge that it’s a problem. No matter how many times I try to quit cold turkey, it’s never a good time.

But, at least I’m trying.

Instead of hating myself and blaming my body for not being able to just pee the goddamn drink out like the skinny consumers of Pepsi probably do, I’m learning that with time, I’ll drink less and less until I just don’t feel like it. Of course, in hindsight, that sounds ridiculous, that’s like telling an alcoholic they can only drink in moderation, but quite frankly this is Pepsi we’re talking about. I know that drinking more water will help me feel way more hydrated and full, and yeah, maybe a glass of soda with my dinner could be the reward I get for staying away from it!

As you can see, this is still an ongoing problem of mine, but I will not link the disgust of my growing fat to my Pepsi addiction. I simply can’t; cutting out Pepsi isn’t going to automatically make me 100 pounds lighter. And that’s the problem I encountered in the past: thinking that Pepsi was causing me to gain so much weight. 

Cutting out Pepsi from my life will probably only help me stay diabetes-free for longer, and that’s what I need to focus on when trying to quit drinking Pepsi. This idea that it’ll make me lose weight simply isn’t true; sure it will stop me from gaining more weight, but cutting one thing out of my diet isn’t going to do it.

So, after all of this, what am I really going to do with this Pepsi addiction?

Well, a couple of things:

• Stop linking the idea of cutting out Pepsi with this automatic weight-loss; it simply isn’t going to happen.
• Drink it in moderation to train myself that I don’t really need to drink it 24/7.
• Lastly, stop punishing myself for gaining weight because once again, drinking Pepsi is not the only thing that is causing weight gain, nor I stop drinking it will solve my weight problem.

But what do I know, maybe I’m just justifying my addiction like any other addict.

It could be hard loving yourself, especially being a size 26 knowing that you were a size 20 when you were out of high-school. Sometimes, looking at yourself in old pictures isn’t about missing the memories behind them, you look at them because you think you were prettier back then and now you’re just this “fat blob of a woman.”

But then I remember that I was thinking the same thing even when taking this picture. The deal is: weight doesn’t define self-love.

Hello. I’m Liz, and I am a fat girl with some deep-rooted issues.

Welcome to my world.

I come from a family of Italians and Puerto Rican’s. While my Puerto Rican family is not fat, my Italian side is, and I guess my sister and I just got that “fat gene” in the family. When we were younger, nobody cared if little Liz was chubby; she was a baby, and being a chubby baby met that you were the cutest thing in the world. But then you get older and that same family tells you that you’re getting bigger. “You should lose some weight”. “She’s gotten heavier since I last saw her.” And my personal favorite: “I’ll pay you $100 if you lose 100 pounds.” I’m not joking, that’s a true story.

We have this idea that fat is ugly, fat is bad, and fat is something that you shouldn’t want to have a lot of. We get fed these bullshit ideas that you can lose 16 pounds in 4 weeks (right, Jenny Craig advertisement in Bay Ridge?) and hear other people’s bullshit stories on how they are so much happier being “skinny” and “a couple of dress sizes smaller.”

And I fell for it time after time, thinking I was ugly, that my depression or sadness stemmed from a place of being fat, thinking that skipping meals and drinking only water in middle school would help me get skinny and stop being bullied by my own friends, and thinking that being skinny would stop making me be everyone’s second choice.

So as I got older and as I got fatter, I stopped caring, in all honesty. I stopped holding my body accountable for growing in the way that it does. Could I eat healthier? Of course. Could I be more active? Sure. But those things aren’t going to ultimately help me lose the 100+ pounds that won’t consider me “obese” on the “average height and weight chart.”

My body can’t even get to be that small even if it’s the ideal “weight for my height”, and I learned that from witnessing a family member of mine battle anorexia a couple of years ago.

Yeah, who would’ve thought that projecting this idea of “I’m happy being skinner” could cause eating disorders?

As of this moment, I am focused on loving my body in the skin that it’s in, whether it’s in a size 20, size 26, or in the baggier size 30.

This isn’t just a fat girl story learning to love her body. This is a story on how a fat girl learned that her self-worth isn’t measured in dress sizes, real romance isn’t just a skinny person’s privilege, and that respect, power, and confidence could walk in a body like mine.

This a project about self-love.

To build yourself up after years of abandonment is challenging; you don’t know where to start, you have to clean up the mess that’s gathered over the years, and ultimately you have to create the foundation in order to start building things up strong and tall.

And this is the story of how it began.